MER Article Letters SAID’S WAR ON THE INTELLECTUALS Edward Said’s interview with Barbara Harlow (MER 171) is an attempt to “dislodge” an array of opponents, ranging from “scholar-combatants” and “instant experts” to “native informants.” An important focus of the interview is the war’s repercussions on “the intellectua (Author not identified) • 18 min read
MER Article Graham-Brown, Images of Women Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East, 1860-1950 (Quartet, 1988). The invention of photography in 1839 coincided, Sarah Graham-Brown observes, with a vigorous phase of European global expansion. Egypt and Palestine were among early testing gro Maya Jaggi • 3 min read
MER Article Dangerous Asset Two major schools of interpretation seek to explain why the United States grants Israel an annual subsidy of nearly $4 billion and consistently supports Israeli militarism and expansionism. The domestic politics approach attributes the “special relationship” to the political and financial power of the Zionist lobby and Jewish influence in Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article Bush Locks Horns with Shamir On January 21, six days into the US air war against Iraq, Israeli Finance Minister Yitzhak Modai took advantage of Washington’s praise for Israel’s “restraint” in the face of 11 Scud missile attacks to drop a bombshell of his own. Before the assembled Jerusalem press corps, he advised visiting Deput Jeffrey Blankfort • 5 min read
MER Article The Fall of BCCI Aga Hassan Abedi, the founder of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), talked a lot about starting an “ordinary” bank with an extraordinary mission. He never tired, and still does not, of expounding on his vision and ambitions, which became the bank’s credo and one that many (Author not identified) • 5 min read
MER Article New Writing On Women, Politics and Social Change Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991). Seteney Shami, Lucine Taminian et al, Women in Arab Society: Work Patterns and Gender Relations in Egypt, Jordan and Sudan (Oxford: Berg, 1990). Bouthaina Shaaban, Both Right and Left Handed: Arab Women Talk About The Sarah J Graham-Brown • 16 min read
MER Article Gender, Sexuality and the Iraq of Our Imagination Writings on colonialism and post-colonial portrayals of the Third World are rife with constructions of the Other as feminine, or as subject, like women, to the passionate irrationality, weakness, cowardice, traditionalism and superstition that mark the feminine as subordinate in Western discourse. I Anne Norton • 8 min read
MER Article Recording "Real Life" in Wadi Zayna Neither a village nor a suburb, Wadi Zayna is a collection of gray tenements straggling between two roads leading up from the coast road into the hills of Iqlim al-Kharoub, just north of Sidon. Palestinians displaced from camps in the south and Beirut during battles with the Shi‘i Amal movement (198 Rosemary Sayigh • 8 min read
MER Article Women and Work in Istanbul On the Asian side of the Istanbul lies a district which I will call Yenitepe. [1] At its center it is a teeming municipality of small shops and low-rise working-class apartments, but at its edge Yenitepe’s streets branch into a haphazard network of dirt roads threading together houses in Jenny White • 16 min read
MER Article The Egyptian Women's Health Book Collective The publication of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s famous and controversial book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1976) created wide repercussions and charted a way for women all over the world to gain personal control, through the possession of objective and necessary information, over their own Nadia Farah • 5 min read
MER Article Women and Public Participation in Yemen Although still old-fashioned when compared with their Levantine or North African sisters, constrained by patriarchal social structures, and limited in their earning capacities, Yemeni women play at least a token role in contemporary political and economic life. They may well be the most “liberated,” though not the most privileged, women Sheila Carapico • 3 min read
MER Article Women, Islam and the State Most commentary on gender and politics in the Middle East assigns a central place to Islam, but there is little agreement about the analytic weight it carries in accounting for the subordination of women or the role it plays in relation to women’s rights. [1] Using the Qur’an, Deniz Kandiyoti • 14 min read
